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@feld @dweinberger @Moon Addressing the “mistakes” one by one: IP had to run on the small minicomputers used by the APARNET, which is one reason Cerf couldn’t sell bigger keys than 32 bit. It was certainly realized by the early 1980s that wasn’t going to be enough.

He’s absolutely right about key discipline. Incorporating anything more than checksumming at the IP and TCP levels was a non-starter at the time and to this day, see how one of the new crypto crowd social media things has people posting their private keys or so I heard.

RSA is also very expensive, involves manipulating huge integers. There’s also a political dimension that made all that extremely radioactive and incorporating it would have probably prevented it from being a success.

Third of not anticipating how big what eventually was developed as the world wide web was not a mistake, nor was something that had any relevance to IP and TCP except they needed to be very good. Which they were and still are.